"Oracle Application Express is the primary custom development platform at General Healthcare Group (GHG),” said Marc Yaneza, Technology Director IT, General Healthcare Group. “Its speed of delivery and ease of use has given GHG an excellent, cost effective, scalable platform to get the right tailored applications delivered when required. We’re really looking forward to Oracle Application Express 4.0 where Dynamic Actions and the new reporting capabilities will provide a much richer user experience. Plug-Ins will also help us to technically streamline the way that we create, deliver and re-use custom code, increasing productivity.”

“At PINNACLE Software Corporation, a division of PAETEC Incorporated, we utilize Oracle Application Express to develop our enterprise class Service Lifecycle management software that is used to help IT organizations manage their service support and service delivery business operations,” said Dennis Vanill, Senior Manager Software Development, PAETEC. “We are eager to begin leveraging several of the new and enhanced features available within Oracle Application Express 4.0 designed to help facilitate larger team development. We are particularly excited about the ability to create dynamic actions and plug-ins to easily extend the functionality of the tool. Additionally, we hope to drive efficiencies within our development organization by leveraging the integrated project management, feedback and bug tracking features built inside the tool.”

Citing a particularly useful new feature, Hichwa notes that Dynamic Actions allows developers to declaratively create a broad range of AJAX controls without coding JavaScript. "This enables developers who don't know JavaScript to develop rich client side functionality they could not otherwise develop. It also improves productivity in that it's faster than coding JavaScript." Another useful capability, Pluggable Components, allows APEX to be extended by third parties to include new components such as advanced item controls - mashups to, for example, Google maps, etc., Hichwa says. "The plug-ins are installed and then appear as if native when creating components using wizards. Pluggable components empower the community to extend APEX as they wish."

"By far, this is the most significant release to date. It has more features and pushes the platform much farther than previous releases," said Mike Hichwa, an Oracle vice president of software development.

On the surface, APEX proves to be a very basic tool that offers a lot of RAD capabilities and is quite simple to get started with. As users delve deeper into the tool, they will find a lot of powerful capabilities that may offer just enough flexibility to delay the need to buy more advanced development suites. It all comes down to how developers want to present data and fill table forms on the Web for their users.